The Armageddon Letters: Kennedy/Khrushchev/Castro in the Cuban Missile Crisis

PUBLISHER

Roman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

CITY

Lanham, MD

DATE PUBLISHED

2012

ISBN

978-1-4422-1679-2

Drawing from twenty-five years of research by the authors, this unusual book allows the reader an experiential perspective on the Cuban Missile Crisis. It is organized around forty-three documents, which include thirty letters and communications between U.S. President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Primier Nikita Khrushchev, five letters exchanged between Khrushchev and Fidel Castro, and several other documents related to the Crisis. The documents present raw data and first-person views that indicate just how close the Crisis came to nuclear danger and the particular look and feel of that danger. The authors provide six aids to assist the reader to become intimately involved with the main players in the Crisis: they use familiar names (Jack, Nikita Sergei’ich, and Fidel); they provide the psychological context of the letters; the narrative is written in the present tense; descriptive cartoons with dialogue place the documents in their historical context; and theatrical previews serve as executive summaries for each chapter. The authors intend for the book and its associated website to enable readers to experience the feelings that the leaders did in their close encounter with Armageddon.